en.Wedoany.com Reported - PaaS provider Railway is leveraging artificial intelligence to design its data center deployments. The company disclosed in a blog post that it uses Anthropic's Claude to plan the construction of "Gen 2" data center sites.
The deployment plan designed by Claude covers four geographic regions, involving eight or nine different data centers, including "six vendors, dozens of network providers, dozens of technicians, hundreds of entries, thousands of cables, and a lot of Velcro." All of this work needs to be completed within a two-to-three-week installation window.
Railway currently operates on a combination of Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), and its own bare metal servers deployed in data centers. When first launching bare metal servers, the company deployed Gen 1 in eight phases over 18 months. In the blog, the company explained that after building the initial site skeleton in each region and filling it to 20% capacity, it would spend several months on other tasks before repeating the same process at the next site. Starting from the initial skeleton, capacity was expanded in batches of 15% to 20% of site capacity, gradually filling the site. However, demand growth and supply chain issues caused by massive demand for various materials—from DRAM to fiberglass—limited this pace.
Railway provided Claude with a "framework" to operate, including version control for physical infrastructure, design rule checks for equipment, cables, racks, or sites, a parts library, and an attribute and constraint system. The company also made its internal data center infrastructure management (DCIM) "real-time" and added a set of MCP tools with record-keeping skills. Actual construction is handled by a single global contractor, with teams distributed across each geographic region where the company operates.
In terms of hardware specifications, Gen 2 features "the latest generation AMD Zen 5c EPYC CPU, 96 cores (192 threads), paired with DDR5, five times the storage capacity of Gen 1, and dual 100G ConnectX-6 network cards." Gen 2 uses the same chassis as Gen 1 storage servers, reducing four SKUs to two. Each Gen 2 site is built adjacent to, rather than on top of, its Gen 1 site, and the two are connected via owned dark fiber: 400G links traverse four different paths, using DWDM where additional wavelengths are needed. In most regions, the nearest major cloud provider region can be reached in well under one millisecond.
As of early June, Gen 2 has gone live in three of the four regions: the U.S. West (California), the U.S. East (Virginia), and Amsterdam, Netherlands, with the remaining region being Singapore.
Railway was initially built on GCP but previously stated that this brought "a series of issues that posed existential risks to our business," including impacts on pricing and difficulty understanding the root causes of upstream problems. The company once wrote that despite spending millions of dollars annually, the support received from Google Cloud was comparable to spending $100. Recently, Google Cloud suspended a Railway project due to detecting a surge in cryptocurrency mining. According to sources familiar with the matter, multiple customer accounts were suspended as a result, and Railway's account had long failed to address abuse activities on its platform. Communication between the parties was swift, but no formal support tickets were submitted.
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